


First They Must Live

by Gammarad



Category: The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith
Genre: Callous Treatment of Convicts, Gen, Loss of Multiple Senses, Minor Character Deaths, Space Exploration, animal experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21897436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: Before Scanners lived in vain, they were vital to the exploration of space by the early Instrumentality of Mankind.No one knew why everyone who went into deep space suffered, then died. They called it the Great Pain of Space. It was keeping humanity in their own Solar System; it was a prison and a barrier.The two who broke humanity out of this prison were Henry Haberman and Eustace Cranch. From the depths of the Instrumentality's archives, their story.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	First They Must Live

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morgan (duckwhatduck)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckwhatduck/gifts).



_One of the men who gave humanity the stars was named Henry Haberman._

Henry Haberman was a doctor, first, a doctor foremost. But he was still a man. He was a big man, an ugly man, a brute of a man who could not find affection for his looks, a dismal and acrimonious man who could not find love for his personality, a skilled and expert man who found respect and a kind of friendship with a colleague. 

That colleague was Eustace Cranch, a doctor too, a trim and elegant man, a kind and beloved man. Cranch had an abundance of friends and friendly acquaintances, numerous girls in love with him, and did not much mind their importuning. He had a wealth of self-regard and self-satisfaction and he had skill and expertise to match that of his colleague and friend, Henry Haberman.

On Old Earth's Moon in Year One these two doctors, so alike and so different, worked side by side to care for the men who voyaged into space and back again, and the women too, when women traveled to Earth and Venus and Mars and the asteroid belt.

Bones grew weak and muscles atrophied and all the parts of a human being suffered from space, from the alien environment they were not meant for, but doctors had invented many new treatments and ways of healing, knew more and more about the bodies of human beings and of animals, of Men and of Beasts. No longer did human beings die in vast numbers merely to help their species survive on a new planet or to follow an overlord's whim; there were criminals and they occasionally murdered, but it was a scandal and news for a year-tenth when it happened.

When the first ships went out to the Up and Out, far enough so the star that warmed Old Earth was lost amid the Milky Way, they came back. Oh, but they came back empty of life. The men who had been aboard were dead, torn and viciously murdered, all of them. 

The second ships came back and one man lived, Michel Vomact, grandson of the first Lady of the Instrumentality, an important man, and the only survivor. "The Great Pain of Space," he said, and "Death! Let me die, let me die, let me die." 

What was the Great Pain of Space? No one knew. Those two skilled and expert doctors, Haberman and Cranch, put their heads together and determined to find out. They would not let Michel Vomact die. Into a coma the doctors put him, into a twilight between death and life, and the telepathic nurses could not stand to be near him: his mind continued to plead for death. A mind-blank nurse had to be found to care for the grandson of the Lady Vomact, in order that he might live.

"We must go to the Up and Out," Haberman said. He had a touch of telepathy himself, not as much as a Vomact, but he could hear the pleas of his patient to die. "We must feel it for ourselves."

"We must not go to the Up and Out," Cranch disagreed. "All those who have, have died, save one and he begs us for death every moment. If we are not to die, we must not. I do not care to die. There is so much to live for! Friends and lovers, conversation and kisses, not to mention our work, your work and mine, my friend."

"If we do not learn what the Great Pain of Space is," Haberman countered, "we cannot cure it. We are doctors. We will cure this and let humanity voyage to the stars." He gripped Cranch's arm tightly.

Cranch winced, but did not pull his arm away. 

Haberman saw the wince. He let go, his expert eye discerning the damage he had done to Cranch (that he had not meant to do, that Cranch had allowed him to do, that Cranch had not berated him for, not hated him for, not complained of). He shouted, angry, "We must go!" 

"We will send animals," Cranch said. "We will wire them up to machines to detect the damage and bring them back, alive or dead, to see what they have suffered."

Cranch created systems that would keep the animals alive as long as possible, no matter the pain, no matter the desire to die. Cranch added pain-relieving drugs to the systems to ease the animals' pain as much as he could and still keep them alive.

Haberman wired the animals up to systems that would sense their responses, write out the status for the doctors to read on the ship's return from the Up and Out. He hooked up a machine to tell their heart function, lymph function, lung function, brain function, adrenaline, serotonin, all the chemicals of emotion in their spectrum array. 

Electrodes covered their skin, sensors over their eyes and in their ears detected the signals from their retinas and tympania. Sensitive atomic sniffers detected the smells that reached the animals' noses. 

When the animals were in place, all the machinery tested and ready, the ship was sent Up and Out and immediately returned. It was no more than a month to voyage out far enough to reach the regions where the Great Pain of Space had killed so many. 

While the animals were suffering for science, for the destiny of humanity to explore the stars, Michel Vomact persuaded one of the telepathic nurses to take pity on him and let him die. She was sent to Venus to retire from nursing for the crime of over-empathy.

Robbed of his prime specimen, Haberman stomped around the Moon base, raging. Telepathic and mind-blind nurses alike ducked into supply closets to avoid him. Other doctors looked down and did not meet his eyes. Only Eustace Cranch, his colleague and friend, still spoke to Henry Haberman.

"My friend, the animals will give us what we need," Cranch said.

"To no use! I could have saved him, but he is dead," Haberman shouted. "Weakling! Coward! To insist on dying when I would have saved him!"

"You will save the dreams of all men," Cranch said. "What is one life, to that?"

"Every life is the life of all men," Haberman said, no longer shouting, staring with intensity of feeling at his colleague, the only man who still spoke to him when he raged. He hated this man Cranch, he thought. He hated that this man did not protect himself from Haberman's violence. But he did not say that, because Cranch was the closest thing to a friend that he had.

The ship of animals returned. Cranch and Haberman read the readouts, charted the charts, mapped the torment that the Great Pain of Space had inflicted on the animals before they died. 

"They suffer from every sense," Haberman said. "They suffer from the sound, from the smell, from the feeling of heat and cold and what ought to be comfort. They suffer so, and we cannot discern why. What use is all my skill and learning against the Great Pain of Space?" He raged, he despaired, his head low, arms folded over it, the picture of a man defeated.

"They do not suffer from what they see," Cranch said. "They do not suffer from their proprioceptive sense. From all other senses, they suffer, but not from those."

Haberman reared his head up. "Cranch!" he shouted. "Let us experiment!"

It took all the skill and all the expertise of both doctors to invent the Haberman process, and when they had finally succeeded in severing the hearing, the sense of smell, the sense of touch beyond what was needed for proprioception, the sense of taste, all pain and all pleasure, from the mind of an ape -- when the machine Haberman had invented and attached to the creature with hundreds of wires was intercepting and blocking all those signals from the ape's nervous system -- a year had passed.

The first habermans were made by manual surgery, Cranch and Haberman assisted by telepathic nurses guiding them through the ape's mind or the criminal's mind. They experimented on criminals, men who had murdered other men or women, been condemned to death, and then they sent those men Up and Out.

The men came back. Most of them, alive. The machinery said they had all experienced the Great Pain of Space, but since they had not _felt_ it, had been in fact unable to feel anything at all, they lived. The few who did not live had been murdered by their criminal companions aboard the ship for some trivial reason. Not one of them had died of the Great Pain of Space, not one.

"We have solved one problem and created another," said Eustace Cranch. "If the only men who can safely go Up and Out are murderers, they will murder one another among the stars. How can humanity safely voyage in the hands of criminals?"

The brother of Michel, Joseph Vomact, was the first Scanner. He volunteered for the Haberman surgery, to trade his every sense but sight for the freedom of the Up and Out. To him, the doctors gave command over, control over the criminals. 

Other doctors, not Haberman or Cranch, discovered a deep sleep in which first animals, then humans, could safely voyage through the Up and Out, not waking to knowledge of the Great Pain of Space. 

The need for habermans and Scanners quickly outpaced the manual surgery the doctors could do. The manufactories of the Moon could build ship after ship to go to the Up and Out. Recruiting Scanners was slower, but enough men did not care for their senses so much as they cared for the adventure of space or the destiny of humanity among the stars to staff the ships and supervise the criminal crews. 

Technicians built the haberman machines, devices that could do the surgeries and route the feelings of the brain through the readout boxes mounted on the body of the man who had undergone the haberman process surgery. 

"We must stop," Cranch said, one day in Year Six.

"What must we stop?" Haberman asked.

"We must stop creating habermans, stop creating Scanners. Stop sending ships Up and Out, stop going to the stars. It is killing us from the inside out," Cranch said.

The fury rose instantly within Haberman. Stop his greatest achievement? Stop the single success that would carry his name to eternity? Stop the only thing that he had ever done right? He smashed his fist into the wall behind Cranch's head. 

Cranch did nothing to protect himself. "A Scanner's life is no longer a life," he said. "Let me show you." He led Haberman to a bed in the upper ward of the hospital. 

Joseph Vomact, the first Scanner, lay on his back, still, staring up at the ceiling.

"He cannot hear us," Cranch said. He wrote on a podium next to the bed. The lines he drew were echoed on the ceiling overhead for the Scanner to read. He wrote, _What is wrong?_

Joseph Vomact lay still and did not answer. He was in the hospital because he was unable to do his work. No one knew why; perhaps Eustace Cranch knew why. Cranch made the words on the screen above flash and move until the Scanner on the bed finally became aware of the doctors' presence.

Joseph used his nail to scratch his answer on the screen of his own chest. _There is nothing. Wrong._

"Do you see? We must stop it." Cranch's face wore a tight, sorrowful expression like a veil over his usual geniality.

Haberman hated the expression. Hated Cranch. Hated Vomact lying in the bed. "I do not see," he said. He looked, and refused to see.

He was determined to prove his friend and colleague wrong. Haberman took himself to the room in the hospital where the latest version of the machine that bore his name was housed. He lay down on its bed and put himself inside. 

The machine severed his nerves from the ability to hear, to smell, to taste, to feel pain, to feel pleasure, to feel hot and cold. The machine wired all those nerves to a box it placed on his chest and to readouts he could watch and know if he was healthy, breathing, in danger, in overload, or dying. Otherwise he would not know, would not feel, would not have the least inkling of suffering until death.

The process was irreversible. 

No one went through it without lengthy discussion, filling out forms, signing his agreement to this thorough and horrifying change, or alternatively committing murder, being convicted, and sentenced to death. No one until Henry Haberman.

Cranch tried to see his friend but Haberman would not see Cranch. It did not hurt to lose the nearest thing he had to a friend, his long time equal and colleague. Haberman felt nothing. It was, in a distant way, a relief to feel nothing. A distance from sorrow and rage, from being an ugly brute of a man who no one liked. He still had his expertise, his status as a doctor, and he now had something more: he could go to the Up and Out, awake, and see it for himself. See with the only sense he had left.

Haberman flew as a Scanner on several voyages, saw the Up and Out with his own eyes, watched animals suffer from the Great Pain of Space that still no one knew what it was or why it was. He watched with his eyes as his own body suffered the same pain, and did not feel it.

The first time he returned to the Moon, Haberman refused to see Cranch. Anger that he had nearly forgotten rose up in him despite the distance, and he refused, and no one countermanded his refusal. The second time, he refused again, for the same reason.

The third time, he agreed to see his former colleague. 

Cranch did not appear elegant and composed as usual. He was disheveled and feverishly intent. "I told you we must stop, but I was wrong," he said. Haberman had gained facility in lip-reading since his hasty trip through the machine that bore his name. 

Haberman nodded his agreement. He did not feel angry any longer. He did not feel any particular way but distant. This man had been his most valued colleague, but he had other colleagues now, the Scanners. They were distant, but many, and all respected him: they owed him their existence. Such as it was.

Cranch gestured Haberman to a chair with wires strung all over it in a complex pattern that a part of his mind, the part with the medical-electrical expertise, was busy analyzing, but had not yet finished working out its meaning. Haberman sat in the chair. He was not one to slow the progress of knowledge down to ploddingly consider consequence. He was a man of precipitous action.

Wires from the chair fit into the boxes mounted on Haberman's body by a haberman machine. Cranch connected each one with care, then took several steps back. He flipped a switch.

Buzzing! Stink! The sharp cut of wire into skin! 

Cranch's voice! "It reverses your surgery. Temporarily." The weight of Cranch's hand on his shoulder! 

"I can feel your," Haberman's voice sounded strange in his ears, "hand on my shoulder, Cranch. I can hear your voice."

There were tears in his colleague's, his friend's, eyes. "My fear was that you never would again."

Haberman put his hand over Cranch's. He could feel that, too, the dry skin over delicate bones of the other man's hand under his own larger, rougher one, that had been doing the work of space for months instead of the work of medicine. He could feel wetness on his own cheeks, though he was not sure why. He had not wanted this back, not asked for it, not longed for it. It meant everything. "You have brought me back to life."

_Just as the machines that severed men from their senses still, so long afterward, bear Haberman's name, so the ones that, for a brief time, gave them those senses back bear Cranch's._


End file.
